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Excerpts from Adam Young's message of 2015-03-16 11:10:01 -0400:
> Oslo policy has been released as a stand alone library.  This is great, 
> in that the rules engine is relatively non-applicaition specific, and I 
> assume that all of the policy based project are planning to migrate over 
> to using the policy library instead of the incubated version.
> 
> Part of the push toward a more dynamic policy mechanism is figuring out 
> how to fetch and cache the policy files from Keystone.  I suspect that 
> the other services have the same issue.
> 
> 1.  How long should a service hold on to the cached version of the 
> policy file?
> 2.  How can we avoid the stampeding herd if Keystone pushes out a 
> notification change event?
> 3.  How do we securely cache the file and still make it possible to debug.

All of these are reasons we have so far resisted building a service to
deploy updates to oslo.config's input files, and rely on provisioning
tools to update them.

Have we consider using normal provisioning tools for pushing out
changes to policy files, and having the policy library look at the
timestamp of the file(s) to decide if it needs to re-read them
before evaluating a rule? Maybe we wouldn't always scan the file
system, but wait for some sort of signal that the scan needs to be
done.

Doug

> 
> The PKI tokens have a lot of these same issues, and have a one-off 
> mechanism for handling it.  We should probably look in to commonizing 
> this function.
> 
> There general mechanism should be "fetch and cache" but I think it 
> should not be tied to keystone token validation so much as capable of 
> using it if necessary.  I'm guessing that access to policy rules are 
> typically controlled by auth token validated services.  Is this correct?
> 
> Maybe the right level of abstraction is a callback function for fetching 
> the file to be cached, with the default being something that uses 
> python-requests, and then an  auth plugin based alternative for those 
> that require Keystone tokens.
> 
> Before I go off and write a spec, I'd like to know what the prior art is 
> here.  I'd also like to know if there oslo policy library is part of the 
> plans for the other groups that are doing policy based work?
>